14 Facts About Mallard duck

Mallard or wild duck is a dabbling duck that breeds throughout the temperate and subtropical Americas, Eurasia, and North Africa, and has been introduced to New Zealand, Australia, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the Falkland Islands, and South Africa.

Mallard duck is considered to be a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature .

Mallard duck was one of the many bird species originally described in the 1758 10thedition of Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus.

Mallard duck gave it two binomial names: Anas platyrhynchos and Anas boschas.

Also, the paucity of morphological differences between the Old World mallards and the New World mallard demonstrates the extent to which the genome is shared among them such that birds like the Chinese spot-billed duck are highly similar to the Old World mallard, and birds such as the Hawaiian duck are highly similar to the New World mallard.

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Several species of duck have brown-plumaged females that can be confused with the female mallard.

Mallard duck is a rare example of both Allen's Rule and Bergmann's Rule in birds.

Mallard duck is widely distributed across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres; in North America its range extends from southern and central Alaska to Mexico, the Hawaiian Islands, across the Palearctic, from Iceland and southern Greenland and parts of Morocco in the west, Scandinavia and Britain to the north, and to Siberia, Japan, and South Korea.

Mallard duck is omnivorous and very flexible in its choice of food.

Mallard duck usually feeds by dabbling for plant food or grazing; there are reports of it eating frogs.

Ecological changes and hunting have led to a decline of local species; for example, the New Zealand grey Mallard duck population declined drastically due to overhunting in the mid-20th century.

Eastern or Chinese spot-billed duck is currently introgressing into the mallard populations of the Primorsky Krai, possibly due to habitat changes from global warming.

Laysan duck is an insular relative of the mallard, with a very small and fluctuating population.

Almost all domestic duck breeds derive from the mallard, with the exception of a few Muscovy breeds, and are listed under the trinomial name A p domesticus.